function smartEncodingDetect(string $string, array $priorities = ['UTF-8', 'ISO-8859-1', 'Windows-1252']) foreach ($priorities as $encoding) // For UTF-8, validate it strictly if ($encoding === 'UTF-8' && mb_check_encoding($string, 'UTF-8')) return 'UTF-8'; // For others, attempt detection if (mb_detect_encoding($string, $encoding, true) === $encoding) return $encoding; return 'UTF-8'; // safe fallback
// Double-check UTF-8 validity if ($detected === 'UTF-8' && !mb_check_encoding($string, 'UTF-8')) return 'Windows-1252'; // common fallback detect encoding php
For serious work, mb_detect_encoding has limitations. Consider nelexa/encoding or symfony/polyfill-intl-normalizer , but the gold standard is Mozilla’s universalchardet (ported to PHP as jaybizzle/crawler-detect or similar, or use the mbstring strict mode). You can pass a custom list of encodings:
$string = "Café"; $encoding = mb_detect_encoding($string); echo $encoding; // UTF-8 (usually) By default, it looks for . You can pass a custom list of encodings: It scans a string and tries to guess the character set
PHP gives us tools to handle this, but they aren't magic. Let’s look at how to reliably detect encoding—and when you shouldn't rely on detection at all. PHP’s Multibyte String extension (mbstring) provides mb_detect_encoding() . It scans a string and tries to guess the character set.